Climate - how UKIP and the Tory right will defeat themselves

Why are those so opposed to migration so blind to something that will cause it to increase so dramatically?

Flickr/dachalan

I’m not talking about the sheer barkingness and loose-cannonness of so
many of UKIP's Councillors and MEPs; I’m not talking about how their plans to
move to an American-style healthcare system (ie to dismantle the NHS) will doom them electorally once voters get
to know about them; I’m not even talking about their barely-suppressed racism
and anti-Muslim prejudice which will surely come back to bite them as Britain
keeps becoming a more tolerant society. I’m talking about their outright
climate-denial, and the consequences thereof, consequences that I think we are
only just starting to understand.

The climate-denial of UKIP (and of the Tory hard right, the Democratic
Unionist Party in Ulster, the BNP, the US Republicans and so
on) will have disastrous consequences for them in one of two ways. For the sake
of all the world’s children, we must dearly hope that it is in the first way
rather than the second:

1 - With the ongoing
flooding disaster in southern England,
Britain
is finally waking up to the reality that we, humans, have altered our climate -
with dangerous consequences. The bizarre and unprecedented winter that we are
currently experiencing is showing us
this. Of course, there are still hold-outs, people who go on and on righteously
about the fact that you cannot for certain attribute any one utterly unprecedented
piece of extreme weather to climate chaos. Similarly one can’t attribute any
one case of lung cancer with 100% certainty to smoking … and yet we have now
all managed to get beyond the reprehensible failure to admit that smoking causes lung cancer, a failure
that blighted our collective health for so long. The mention of this example is
not coincidental: the very same forces that fostered cancer-denial for so long--the
preservation of corporate profit--are still trying in some cases to do the
same, for the same reason, with regard to climate-denial, vis a vis greenhouse
gases (See here and here).

And similarly:
imagine asking whether any particular single victory in cycling races can be
attributed with 100% certainty to a cyclist’s using steroids. The answer may
well be ‘No’. And yet, we ban cyclists from using such performance-enhancing
drugs, because of course they make victory drastically more likely. Just as
human-influenced climate change drastically makes more likely events such as
those we are currently experiencing and, tragically, turns ‘one in a thousand’
year events into one in a hundred year events, and ‘one in a hundred’ year events
into once a decade events.

In this new
situation, the climate-deniers are beached, left high and dry: Farage and his
ilk are suddenly floundering, out of their depth, exposed to a media finally
waking up to the issue. Suddenly UKIP and the Tory Right are looking like anachronistic
hold-outs who have managed to dump themselves in the dustbin of history. As the
climate-weather-wake-up-call gets ever louder, they will be marginalised, and
they will fail. They will be beaten by those who showed leadership by telling
the truth even when it wasn’t popular, and who
understand the need to be cautious when faced with
massive environmental threats, and who understand and are prepared to act on
the climate science.

In other words, UKIP
have fatally determined their own demise, by wilfully backing the wrong horse
in relation to climate. Greens (and to some extent also the left) will profit
from the dogmatic refusal to face reality of UKIP (and the right).

That’s the optimistic scenario, and for the first time in years perhaps
it now looks likely. There is a more pessimistic scenario. This again will see
the absolute rout eventually of the likes of UKIP but not until the world has
been well and truly decimated:

2 - What if, collectively, we fail to
wake up fast enough? What if the lunacy of UKIP et al’s climate-denial manages, with the help of the
corporate press, somehow to cling on zombie-like for the next few years, or
even longer? What if climate-denial acts as a drag on efforts by successive
governments to actually act dramatically, as we need to, on climate and on
other impending breaches to the limits to growth? Think about it:
the weather chaos that climate change is already implicated in causing is
happening with only about one degree of global over-heat. Climate-denial, if unchecked, would contribute to a rapid worsening of the
world’s climate, as climate-dangerous emissions and ‘positive feedbacks’ push
the earth into a new and unknown condition, what James Lovelock calls a ‘fever’.

This will lead, among
other things, to an avalanche of climate refugees battering down our borders
here in the UK.
As countries like Bangladesh
literally go under, and as many countries fail to be able to feed themselves
any more, people are mostly not going to just sit and die. They are going to move. They are going to risk everything to escape
nemesis. They are going to make the levels of migration that we have seen to
date seem trivial in comparison.

In other words,
climate-denial is actively contributing to the creation of exactly the kind of long-term immigration crisis that UKIP et al
claim to want to prevent. If their climate-denial wins out during the next
generation, then they will defeat themselves in a manner quite as definitive as
that outlined in (1), above. Their own ostrich-like behaviour will, under this
scenario, have contributed to their own nemesis: to a Britain
over-run with desperate climate-refugees.

But, as I say, let us
hope earnestly that it is scenario (1) that comes to pass. Let us work
determinedly to ensure that it is. For scenario (2) would be incredibly awful,
for all the citizens of the world: for Brits and the billions of
climate-refugees both. Being able to point out to the last remaining anti-immigration
climate-deniers that they had hoist themselves on their own petard would be
cold comfort indeed.

About the author

Rupert Read was a Green Party councillor in Norwich and a candidate in the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. He is Chair of the Green House thinktank.

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